In death, Brian was not a pretty sight.
No one knew for sure how long his body had lain in an abandoned South Side building before a scavenger discovered it last Tuesday.
Now, two days later, his body rested on a cold, steel gurney in the morgue examining room reserved for decomposed victims, his wrists, ankles and mouth still bound with duct tape. A small hole in the middle of the forehead of this 21-year-old man appeared to be a fatal gunshot wound.
Dr. Robert J. Stein, Cook County`s chief medical examiner for 14 1/2 years, talked into a hand-held tape recorder as he began the first of his four autopsies Thursday to confirm the cause of death.
”The head is almost completely mummified,” Stein said matter of factly in his raspy voice.
Business is brisk, too brisk, these days at the Cook County medical examiner`s office.
Chicago`s near-record homicide rate in 1991 has the office`s pathologists scrambling to keep up.
Last year, the city`s homicide total rose 15 percent over 1989 to 851, and as of last week, the murder rate had risen another 12 percent over last year, Chicago police records indicated.
If the trend continues for the rest of 1991, Chicago will be rivaling its highest one-year murder total of 970, set 17 years ago.
”Look how benign the statistics are until you see something like this,” Stein said as his assistant cut into Brian`s scalp with a razor-sharp instrument.
”They`re not really dead bodies,” said Dr. Nancy Jones, an assistant medical examiner. ”They`re somebody`s mother, brother, child.”
To be sure, the workload doesn`t rank with the 1979 crash of American Airlines Flight 191, in which 273 people died, or the laborious exhumation and identification of the more than two dozen bodies found buried at the home of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
Indeed, homicides don`t even represent the biggest burden on the medical examiner`s office. Each year the office performs some 4,500 autopsies to determine the cause of death; about 1,000 of the victims will be murder victims. The rest die of natural causes, in accidents or suicides, or of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
But 1991`s homicide pace, Stein said, ”means a hell of a lot more work for us, absolutely.” And he feared that it`s only going to get worse. ”Wait for the hot weather,” he said.
”If they took the drugs and gangs away, we wouldn`t have much of a murder rate,” Dr. Robert Kirschner, assistant chief medical examiner, said as he performed an autopsy on an infant, a possible SIDS victim. But, he added, ”We`re busier than ever.”
Compounding the medical examiner`s workload, several doctors said, is that the office hasn`t been able to fill three pathologist positions, leaving it 25 percent below full strength. The doctors said it is hard to attract employees because of the office`s relatively low starting salary. The result is the increased workload must be spread among four pathologists on any day, not five.
On this day, the four worked 18 autopsies among them. As is the office custom, Stein and the other doctors gathered in the autopsy room at 8:30 a.m. to brief one another on the four or five autopsies each would perform.
An autopsy takes between one and four hours, with victims of multiple gunshot wounds requiring the longest. It`s usually early afternoon before the autopsies are completed, leaving the doctors the rest of the day for follow-up work and frequent appearances in criminal court to testify at murder trials.
As the doctors and several students stood in a circle in the middle of the room to discuss the day`s cases, six corpses lay on gurneys behind them.
The victims included an 8-month-old boy, a 2-year-old girl with pink and yellow barrettes still on her pigtails, and a man whose arms were stuck in the air above his head, frozen by rigor mortis.
The other bodies are kept in an adjoining cooler, stacked six high on separate platforms.
Before the meeting, Stein had already been talking about the day`s most interesting case. A 12-year-old girl died of possible pneumonia in Cook County Hospital, but two months earlier, she had tried to hang herself at home. Tests during her first hospitalization uncovered cocaine and valium in her blood.
”This case presents all kinds of questions,” said Kirschner, who was assigned the case.
Stein and the other doctors are quick to admit that unlike the medical examiner on the old ”Quincy” television show, they don`t have all the answers.
Also on the day`s autopsy list were three gunshot victims, including Brian, and a man known to to have been an alcoholic who had been punched in the face in a street altercation. Cirrhosis of the liver, though, appeared to be his actual cause of death.
And then there was a 54-year-old man found dead in a motel. An unknown woman had called the manager to say something was wrong with the man before she fled the scene, saying, ”My husband is going to kill me.”
The prognosis, Dr. Barry Lifschultz told the other doctors: ”Heart attack during sex.”
For these doctors and their assistants who do the grim sawing and cutting, it is just another job in many ways. Kirschner discussed the remodeling of his home as he performed the autopsy on the infant.
But even the veterans sometimes have difficulty coping with the homicides of children.
Between mid-March and the end of April, 29 children died violently in Cook County, though most were teenagers, according to Sharon O`Connor, an employee of the state Department of Children and Family Services who works full-time at the morgue.
Dr. Jones remembered being particularly bothered by a 6-year-old who had been abducted while playing in the street, brutalized and dumped in a garbage can for the mother to find.
”Trying to separate your outrage from being just a scientist is very difficult to do, especially when you`re dealing with children,” Jones said.
”There`s a tremendous emotional toll that I don`t think you can appreciate.”
”You never really get used to it,” said Robert Nicks, an assistant in the autopsy room for 15 years and himself a grandfather. He described his first week on the job as full of ”bad dreams, little sleep and a lot of drinking.”
Sherry Davis, a young photographer who snaps shots of corpses all morning, said she tries not to think about what she is doing. She also tunes Stein and the other doctors out when their descriptions get too graphic during autopsies.
”I think I`ve become more paranoid,” said Davis, recounting how she once slumped low in the passenger seat of a car when her friend got into an argument with another motorist. All Davis could think of at the time was the one homicide victim, killed as a result of a traffic dispute, who had recently been in the morgue.
